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Shortcuts Essentials

Advanced Toggl Timers with Dictionaries

• Federico

In what should be considered a regular mini series of the Workflow Corner at this point, I recently came up with a system to make my Toggl time tracking workflows (previously: MacStories and Issue 63 of MacStories Weekly) even more flexible while reducing their footprint in the Workflow widget (where most of my interactions with these workflows take place).

First, to cut the number of workflows displayed in the widget, I grouped some of them into individual “launcher” workflows that use the new ‘Run Workflow’ action to execute an external workflow. In the example below, you can see how a menu allows me to pick from a variety of MacStories-related timers; depending on what I choose, a different ‘Run Workflow’ action is called to invoke the associated workflow.

Thanks to this shortcut method – a meta-workflow to launch other workflows – I’ve been able to integrate multiple timers into launchers, thus making the entire dashboard more compact and readable. Having new and better glyphs for each workflow also helps.

The most important functional change to my Toggl workflows, though, is how I’ve started relying on dictionaries and Magic Variables to pass data to the Toggl API.

In my original Toggl workflows, the implementation of API variables was fairly rudimentary: parameters such as project IDs and timer descriptions were passed to ‘Get Contents of URL’ as ‘Text’ actions; with version 1.7 of Workflow, I was able to remove the ‘Set Variable’ steps, but, due to the use of ‘Text’ actions, workflows were still quite long and not too legible.

I’ve since realized that, when it comes to dealing with groups of text variables related to each other, we can use a ‘Dictionary’ action and extract the information we need through Magic Variables. With this method, variables are kept together in the same dictionary and workflows are slimmer, which makes it an ideal solution for long workflows where you want to display multiple choices and menus.

Consider, for instance, a Toggl timer where you need to pass the following data to the Toggl API:

• A timer’s description
• Project ID
• Task ID
• Tag name

Before, I would have recommended to set up four separate ‘Text’ actions. Now, we can cut it all down to a single ‘Dictionary’ action where values are the variables we need for the API:

Besides being more readable (you can use any name you want for the dictionary keys – even emoji), the savings enabled by dictionaries in lieu of ‘Text’ actions add up if you’re creating workflows with multiple options. If you do the math, while a menu with three options containing 4 actions each consistent of a total of 12 actions before, this new system will cut it down to 3 actions. This is possible because dictionaries can contain multiple sub-items that can be extracted at runtime with Magic Variables.

For this method to work with a ‘Choose from Menu’ block, it is necessary that the dictionaries you use carry the same key names. To make the request to the Toggl API, in fact, we’ll rely on one Magic Variable – the output of the entire menu block, parsed as a dictionary, and set to extract a specific value. Essentially, we’re telling Workflow “get whatever I picked in this menu, interpret it as a dictionary, and extract this specific key”.

A visual representation makes it more clear:

In my example above, you can see how I created a MacStories Team timer workflow with 3 options for Jake, John, and Ryan. Each writer has one ‘Dictionary’ action instead of four ‘Text’ actions. From a menu of three options, a single API request can be made because Workflow can look at a Magic Variable output and always expect the same value to be available no matter what I picked.

I didn’t do a precise calculation, but I’d say that, with this strategy, I’ve roughly slimmed down these advanced Toggl workflows by 70%. I even prefer the way they look because they’re shorter, dictionaries are more descriptive than ‘Text’ actions, and there aren’t a bunch of unused API actions lying around.

I’ve prepared the structure of a sample Toggl Menu workflow to get you started. You can download it here. To extract the data needed for Toggl workflows, you’ll still need the Prepare Toggl Template workflow I released in Issue 63 of MacStories Weekly.

Backup Your Workflows

While it’s fun to play around and create new workflows every week, at some point you’ll want to make sure you have a backup of all the automations you’ve set up in the Workflow app. Enabling Workflow Sync is a good first measure, but I’d also recommend setting up a manual backup system to archive a “hard copy” of all your workflows somewhere else.

Of course – and we’re getting into dangerously DiCaprio-esque territory here (it’s been this week’s theme) – we can make a workflow to backup all your workflows. In fact, all it takes is one action: with the ‘Get My Workflows’ action, the app will generate a collection of every workflow you have installed as a .wflow file. These files can be manually re-imported in the app with the Open In menu on iOS.

If you combine ‘Get My Workflows’ with ‘Make Archive’, Workflow will generate a .zip archive of all your workflows. Thanks to Magic Variables, I set the archive’s file name to a custom date and time string, which makes it easier to see when a backup was created.

You can send the .zip backup to any app or service you want. In my case, I prefer Dropbox as that’s where I keep all of my app and document backups. This backup strategy lets me delete workflows I don’t want to see in the app but which I also don’t want to lose forever. This way, I can always extract the archive, find the workflow I need, and install it again by copying it into the app.

You can get the workflow here.

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Member Requests

• Federico

Workflow can’t see whether audio is currently playing or if it’s been paused by the user, and I believe that’s due to an iOS limitation by Apple. We can’t create a conditional block that checks that information for us. The entire iOS media framework should be expanded to allow developers to fetch more details about what’s playing, see what kind of audio it is (podcast, song, etc.), and control playback.

• Federico

This isn’t possible with DEVONthink, but it can be done with Evernote. Workflow offers native web actions for Evernote, which allow you to retrieve notes from your account without switching between apps.

To get the contents of a specific note, you’ll have to use the ‘Get Notes’ Evernote action and specify a title and notebook (optionally, a tag too) for the note you want Workflow to access. As you requested, you can pre-fill a dictionary with keys and values for different note titles, and then pick one from a list. The value field of the dictionary will be used as the title parameter in the ‘Get Notes’ action.

When using this action, Workflow is performing a search in your account to retrieve notes, so the more details you can enter in the action, the more accurate the results will be. Ideally, if you enter a title, notebook, and choose to only get one note, that note will be what you’re looking for.

To copy the note’s text to the clipboard, you should then add ‘Get Text from Input’ and ‘Copy to Clipboard’. Finally, save the workflow as a widget. The next time you run the workflow as a widget, you’ll see a progress bar while Workflow is pinging Evernote, and the text of the note matched in your Evernote account will be copied to the clipboard. If you want to have further confirmation of the process at the end, you can add a ‘Show Alert’ action that tells you that everything has been successfully copied.

You can get the workflow here.

• Federico

Alas, it appears that Bear doesn’t automatically create a new note if the URL scheme sends an append command for a note that doesn’t already exist (assuming we’re referencing the note by title, which is what I tested). I’d suggest getting in touch with the developers and bringing this up, because it would be a reasonable addition to Bear’s URL scheme.

• Federico

Assuming you use Gmail, I’d recommend Zapier for this.

Zapier supports a variety of triggers for new emails: for instance, you can set a zap to run every time there’s a new message with a specific label, when you star a message, when a message matches a search, or when there’s a new message with an attachment. You can even trigger a zap to run every time you receive a new email, period.

For the purpose of this question, I’ll use a new starred message as an example. In Zapier, create a new trigger for Gmail with ‘New Starred Email’ as the filter. Then, connect the Dropbox action ‘Upload File’ and edit the template of the action. Here, you’ll want to specify where attachments should be saved in your Dropbox account and if they should overwrite existing files.

To save all attachments from a single message, use the ‘All Attachments’ variable from Step 1 (pictured above), which will get all attachments from an email message and save them as individual files in a Dropbox folder. Run a first test (make sure you’ve already starred a message that contains attachments), save the zap, and make sure it’s turned on.

The next time you star a message with attachments, Zapier will save them as files to a Dropbox folder. I wish there was an easier way to do this natively on iOS from any client, but, as I’ve said many times before, dealing with multiple files at once on iOS is still not possible.

• Federico

We can send Airmail messages to TaskPaper thanks to a custom action that launches a workflow. From the workflow, you can then decide your favorite way of appending a line of text to a file in Dropbox.

Here’s what I did. I assumed you wanted a way to turn an Airmail message into a line of text indented in a TaskPaper project with the following details:

• Sender email address
• Email subject
• Airmail link to the message

That meant I had to create a custom action that sends those three parameters to Workflow, which would need to extract them and recombine them in a line of text formatted for the TaskPaper syntax.

Setting up the custom action in Airmail is easy: create a new action, add ‘Send to Workflow’ as the only step, enter the name of the workflow you’ll run (let’s call it ‘TaskPaper Email’) and flip three switches, as pictured above. Then, enter %%TP%% as a custom separator.

In Workflow, I set up a series of actions that split the text at the custom separator and that process Magic Variables to extract the three items we sent from Airmail: the sender’s email address, the message subject, and the unique URL to the Airmail message. These variables are remixed in a ‘Text’ action that creates a new “task” according to TaskPaper’s syntax. I assumed you would have appreciated a way to quickly reopen an Airmail message on both iOS and macOS, so I added the message link at the end of the line.

Now, it’s up to you and how you want to append content to a text file in Dropbox. Workflow has a native ‘Append to Dropbox File’ action, which I’d recommend using as it’ll get the job done. Or, you could send the text to Editorial or other text editors that integrate with Dropbox. It’s your call. Whatever you do, just add a final action after the last ‘Text’ one.

You can get the workflow here.

And now, a fantastic workflow by Club member Brent to stitch multiple screenshots together:

Brent: I thought I would explain a workflow that I use on a semi-regular basis. I call it Screenshot Stitcher. I use this when I want to take a screenshot of something that is longer than the actual screen of the iPhone. In fact, I used it in my post about Re-Using a checklist when I showed a picture of the full workflow.

This workflow requires the use of another app called LongScreen. I could just use the app by itself to achieve the same result, but I prefer the way the workflow triggers it.

It works like this:

• I take a series of overlapping screenshots (meaning the bottom of one is the same as the top of the next. LongScreen uses the overlapping areas to align them.
• I trigger the workflow which finds all screenshots taken in the last 45 seconds. This allows the system to be automated Vs. me having to manually pick what pictures.
• Workflow then counts the number of pictures that were selected.
• It sends that number as part of LongScreen’s URL Scheme telling the app how many pictures to stitch together.
  • I chose to have the stitched output placed on the clipboard.
  • The actual URL I use is longscreen://x-callback-url/copy?&mode=stitch&count=**Input** (with Input being a variable action in workflow)
• At this point in LongScreen I usually just see a white screen for a few seconds while it processes the pictures.
• Back in Workflow, the selected pictures are deleted. I could also delete them via LongScreen but I found the results were more consistent if I had Workflow do it.
• Workflow retrieves the picture from the clipboard and using a Quick Look action shows it to me so that I can decide what I would like to do with it.

If you want to use this workflow, but don’t want to recreate it yourself, then you can get it here.

Feel free to tell me what you think. As always, the best way to reach me is on Twitter. (Brent, @brentacPrime)

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